Wugen wraps up $172m series B

Wugen, a US-based oncology therapy developer spun out of Washington University in St Louis, closed a $172m series B round co-led by Abingworth and Tybourne Capital Management on Thursday.
Alexandria Venture Investments, the venture capital arm of life sciences real estate investment trust Alexandria Real Estate Equities, took part in the round, as did financial services group Fidelity, Intermediate Capital Group (ICG), Sands Capital, Aisling Capital Management, Velosity Capital, Falcon Edge Capital, RiverVest Venture Partners, Lyzz Capital and Lightchain Capital.
Founded in 2018, Wugen is developing a pipeline of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell and memory natural killer (NK) cell therapies for patients with solid tumours, acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and T-cell malignancies. Its lead product candidate, WU-NK-101, has demonstrated the potential to be highly effective against AML.
The series B capital will go towards clinical development of the company’s memory NK cell technology platform and support ongoing clinical trials in patients with various types of cancer. It will also use some of the funding to advance its pipeline of other therapies and to drive recruitment.
Bali Muralidhar, managing partner at Abingworth; Bosun Hau, managing director at Tybourne; and Peter Kiener, venture Partner at ICG, will join Wugen’s board of directors.
The spinout previously raised $36m in a series A round which included Rivervest, LC Endeavor (seemingly a vehicle for Lightchain Capital) and Lyzz Capital that was closed at an undisclosed date.
BioGenerator, part of life science-focused innovation hub BioSTL, invested an undisclosed sum in 2019.
Dan Kemp, president and chief executive of Wugen, said: “We have tremendous confidence that our off-the-shelf memory NK cell platform will give rise to a significant pipeline of highly effective and safe anti-cancer therapies.”
– A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global Corporate Venturing.